A recent project of ours had us devise a very clever method of digitally tracking the position of a carnival wheel. Most of you out there probably aren’t making carnival wheels on a regular basis nor are you often looking to digitally track the position of one, but we were so proud of the method we came up with that we thought it may be worth sharing with the tinkerer community. This does work with a carnival wheel but can also be applied to other spinning objects that need to be tracked.
Making a carnival wheel digital
Jenny Holzer’s “Selections from Truisms”
Moey Inc. was tasked with resuscitating an old Jenny Holzer LED art piece from 1984 entitled “Selections from Truisms”. This video tells the story of the year long journey to reverse engineer the internal electronics and acquire some of the vintage electronic components that were manufactured as far back as 1978.
With Glen Duncan (engineer), Joey Stein (CTO), and Rory Nugent (designer, engineer)
Introduction to industrial sensors
At Moey, it isn’t uncommon that our projects required us to be unique in our design, nimble in our execution, robust in what we deliver, yet economical all at the same time. Considering we’re all tinkerers at heart, this can be a hard pill to swallow. We like to play with new sensors and appreciate the challenge of learning how to use them, but this is often not the best approach when we have a tight timeline and many pieces of a project to worry about. In the past, we’ve used industrial sensors on occasion when we needed to get something done simply with no hiccups down the road but the cost of the sensors have often bothered us. Industrial sensors, while amazingly robust and reliable, are often overkill for what we do and leave us feeling like we’ll never reap the full benefits of the product. However, lately we’ve had a renewed interest as we’ve stumbled upon some really economical sensors that may just have eased our tummies.